The Everyday Mystic

An Everyday Mystic understands that she must build her life like a Greek temple.  The foundation of the temple represents her personal values, those things she holds most dear and important.  The values support the temple columns, which represent different parts of us that we must nourish in order to be whole people: our hearts, our minds and our bodies.  The ceiling of the temple is our spirit, which depends on support from our values, our hearts, our minds and our bodies.  The roof of this temple is our Holistic Well-being, the pinnacle of a life well-lived.  In order to reach the pinnacle of well-being, an Everyday Mystic makes a commitment to honor and develop each of these aspects of herself, knowing that ignoring even one of them will contribute to an unstable temple.  What is true for the individual is true for the organization or team as well - each of these aspects of well-being must be nurtured in order to build a highly functional and productive team.  Let’s examine each of these elements that contribute to building the temple of well-being.

• Foundation: Values - Values represent the foundation of your character, and include the beliefs you hold most dear about living a good life.  This building block can encompass mission, vision and purpose statements as well as the values which govern your behavior.  Most corporate entities have created mission, vision and/or purpose statements that get shelved or filed in a drawer, never to have life breathed into them.  An Everyday Mystic might wish to create his own mission and purpose statements and discern his personal values.  Values include statements of how important things are to you, like money, achievement and the relative importance of family and friends vs. career.  I am creating some assessments for my coaching clients to help them identify their values, purpose and life mission.  My own personal purpose statement is to be a teacher of spiritual intelligence to others, and help them evolve their souls.  Whatever your values are, the real questions for both individuals and organizations are - are you living them, and how do you keep them alive?
• Column One: Body - The body represents our physical manifestation in this world.  There is great wisdom in the body, and it is intimately connected with mind and heart - indeed, body, mind and heart come together to support and build your spirit.  Some say the body cannot lie.  This is the basis of Applied Kinesiology, an alternative medicine practice that uses muscle testing to diagnose illness.  The fact that the body registers emotions is being proven by researchers, but we intuitively understand that through our own experiences: embarrassment causes our cheeks to flush, nervousness produces butterflies in the stomach, sadness makes us cry. We need to take good care of our bodies by feeding them well, exercising them appropriately and getting adequate rest and relaxation, all of which support the spirit. Column Two: Heart - The heart represents our emotional balance and social abilities.  In building spiritual intelligence, we strive to achieve mastery over our emotions. Mastery of emotions does not mean walling off your feelings and denying your emotions or moods. Rather, it is to feel emotions intensely but to let them wash through you without sticking, as it were - to let them roll off you.  One does that by noticing and deeply feeling the emotions, but gaining perspective on them so they don’t become your self-image.  The heart also represents the health of our closest relationships - are we in right relationship with our families and our close friends?  Are we being a best friend to ourselves?
• Column Three: Mind - The mind represents our intellectual capacities and our innate talents.  An Everyday Mystic is constantly on the look-out for new learning opportunities, whether it be through formal means (such as reading and attending classes) or experiential means (like traveling or trying new things).  The mind also represents self-awareness of our strengths and God-given talents, and the wisdom to know how best to develop them.  The mind, though full of wisdom, also holds wisdom’s opposite - the ego or false self, which is the negative inner voice that says you are separate from Source energy, that evil abounds, and that you are not good enough.  Our job is to feed the true self’s voice so the false self dies of starvation.  Then do we feed our spiritual intelligence.
• Spirit - Our spiritual intelligence is our awareness of our connection to Source/God and to all that is. It is our awareness of the meaning of our life, our conscience, our ability to forgive and let go and our ability to evolve our souls to higher levels of consciousness.  It is spiritual intelligence that encourages us to change perspectives, to see things from another person’s eyes, to keep things in perspective and to honor the inter-connectedness of all living beings.  Developing all the other aspects of ourselves allows our spirit to soar, but an Everyday Mystic spends as much time developing and honoring his spirit as he does taking care of the other aspects of himself.

It is the aim of The Everyday Mystic to provide avenues to develop each of the elements of holistic well-being.  Stay tuned for future blog posts that will explore the building blocks of well-being.  Be sure to check out our coaching services as well.

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